Can insurance really deliver on endless personalised needs?

Ancillary products play a major role for e-businesses looking for ways to expand their offering, increase revenue and improve their customer experience. For insurance-related ancillary products, e-businesses must seek the best way to guarantee that the insurance products offered in their customer journey really add value to their consumers, particularly millennials.

Sounds simple. But what does this require? Primarily, e-businesses need the flexibility and independence to determine what insurance products to offer; when to offer them; at what price and to which specific consumers; and how to present and communicate their packages.

Today, most of the available e-business insurance products are fixed and offered at a set price. Typical examples include travel insurance products that usually embed a predetermined set of guarantees, regardless of the consumer’s specific needs.

E-businesses have different types of customers with diverse insurance needs. Consider the following examples:

• Insurance for flight cancellation is less relevant to business travelers, who would typically want to be offered insurance for short flight delays to ensure they get to their meetings on time.
• A family going on a summer vacation to Greece does not require a snow guarantee insurance policy, but would definitely benefit from a rain-free protection package.

These examples not only indicate how complex insurance packages can be; they also highlight the customer experience that is expected. Today, consumers don’t want to match their needs to products – they expect products to meet their needs, along with a perfectly tailored customer journey.

This requires the personalisation of products to ensure relevance to customers’ actual needs. Furthermore, e-business should be offering insurance products with policies priced according to particular travel arrangements and potential risk. That way, a customer going on a one-day business trip from London to Paris will get a different insurance offer than a customer traveling from Rome to Berlin for a getaway weekend via a low-cost carrier.

How can e-businesses meet specific demands for practically endless protections? It requires a paradigm shift in how insurance is being offered, because it literally involves maintaining a factory of insurance products. The ideal solution is a generic insurance platform. Today’s innovation enables such platforms to be integrated via simple APIs into the selling process, forming an automated factory for easily distributing unlimited bespoke solutions and delivering an exceptional buying experience.

About the Author
As Business Development Director at Setoo, Julien Carmona brings a 10-year track record in corporate strategy, business development and successful digital transformation implementation in various industries. Passionate about disruption and digital models, Julien is also very familiar with the innovation ecosystem in Europe and the US.